by Judy Juanita
The tamale pie aroma was chasing away the last of the roach spray, we had The Supremes Live at the Copa on the box, Diana Ross was belting out, “You’re nobody till somebody loves you,” Allwood had rolled a couple of bombs, and the doorbell rang. I opened the door to Wish Woodie all in my face. I was stunned. Wish Woodie Allwood Allwood. my boyfriend my friendboy. I was used to each by himself. I hadn’t anticipated a juncture of the two.
“Geniece, it’s Smoky Joe’s café out back,” Wish said. My landlord had burned trash in the incinerator. “And I’m getting a contact high standing here. Damn, let me in.”
I leaned against the door in the middle of a sammich, a sandwich that had gotten smooshed. I let Wish in and introduced him. He pulled his hand out of his Windbreaker but pushed it back in the nylon pocket when Allwood didn’t extend his.
“Have I seen you at the poor boys’ hall?” Allwood asked Wish.
“What’s that?” Wish asked, turning to me.
“It’s like a dorm for brothers across from City,” Allwood said, rolling a joint.
“Nah, I never hang around City,” Wish said.
“I remember your face. You hang around Telegraph?”
“You mean up at Berkeley?”
“Up at Berkeley? I’m talking about the Avenue. Those four blocks from Bancroft Way to Dwight Way. Maybe Sproul Plaza.”
“The Ave, yeah. I’m always up on Telegraph.” Wish’s toes looked like Brazil nuts in his leather sandals.
“The rest of the campus is off-limits.” Allwood’s toes looked pale in comparison. “Haven’t you seen that sign on Sproul Hall: COLORED PEOPLE NOT ALLOWED EXCEPT JANITORS?”
“They don’t welcome Communists either, but it’s not quite Ole Miss.” Wish looked out at the incinerator. “I guess I didn’t see you at Cinema Psychedelica.”
“Don’t have the leisure to take LSD,” Allwood said. He’d sized up Wish as an acidhead. I felt bad for Wish.
Allwood kept going like he was drilling for oil. “The Avenue’s your playroom?”
Wish shook his head. “I wouldn’t say so. I’m a watcher.”
“Uh, watching life go by with the beatniks in Cafe Mediterranean?”
“It’s Caffe Mediterraneum,” Wish said. We had walked by the coffeehouse often, zonked, and I knew Wish didn’t even go there. Up and down Telegraph, in and out of Pepe’s Pizza, Moe’s Books, Sather Gate Bookstore, the bakery, record stores—Allwood and I spent the most time at the folding card tables, matching the ism to the schisms—Ban the Bomb, Young Socialist Alliance, W. E. B. Du Bois Club, Progressive Socialist Party, Berkeley CORE, Young People’s Socialist League, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Wish asked, “Were you up there Vietnam Day?”
“That’s the first time I saw Bob Moses from SNCC. If I was into heroes, he would be it,” Allwood said.
I’d never heard Allwood use the word hero. I wondered if he had blacked out the non on his SNCC button before or after seeing Bob Moses. “Norman Mailer was drunk. What a gas. Did you see that?”
Wish shook his head and said, “Norman Thomas, the socialist, the mime troupe from the City . . . Berzerkeley. Mario Savio called being at Berkeley sucking at the breast of the holy mother university.” They started slapping hands and laughing.
“Yeah, the knowledge factory,” Allwood said.
“Man, were you at Sproul Hall in sixty-four?” Wish looked at him, half in awe. Allwood shook his head.
“I wasn’t there when Savio climbed on the police car during the thirty-two-hour sit-in. But I was there when he compared the university to an odious machine and told the crowd at Sproul to put their bodies on the wheels and the levers and halt it completely.”
“We saw from the City portables the sheriff’s brigade riding on motorcycles to Sproul Hall,” I popped in. “The Trib said they had more police going down Telegraph Ave to get those students than when President Kennedy came in sixty-three.”
“I heard Mario Savio on KPFA,” Allwood said. “They play the tape over and over.”
“You have to admit Berkeley’s different from a lot of places,” Wish said.
“It’s still not nirvana. The white man’s heaven is the black man’s hell,” Allwood said.
“I was born in Berkeley.” I wanted to lighten things.
“For real?” Wish said. “That makes you a berserk baby.”
“I’m the only one in my family. Everyone else’s born in the South or Oakland.” Their intensity turned from each other.
“My father and mother lived on Acton Street in Berkeley,” I said.
They sat back, Allwood relaxing instead of being on the defense.
Wish said, “Acton. That’s the other side of Sacramento?” Allwood nodded.
“My father, according to my family, gambled away the mortgage in an all-night poker party. We had to move to government housing, the projects. That’s how we ended up in Codornices Village on the other side of San Pablo Avenue where Berkeley Farms dairy stands now.”
Wish said he’d heard of a Codornices Village for UC student housing in Albany, the town next door to Berkeley.
“Owned by the university,” Allwood said. “Emergency federal housing. Three-quarters black, the rest students and Japanese relocated from the concentration camps. Codornices Village was their first stop. Blacks rioted in the fifties when they closed it. That’s where we lived when I was a kid.”
I remembered being on the floor of our unit in Codornices crawling under the wringer washer, oil dripping onto my plaits, getting spanked.
“What if we played together, Geniece?”
I saw myself eating mud pies in the dirt with Asian children, watching the big kids play Old Maid in the grass, being scared stiff of the tall albino boy with the tuft of blond hair that looked like a horse’s mane. The fear that he was a man-horse had given me nightmares.
“We were allowed to occupy every square foot between Sacramento Street and the Bayshore Freeway,” Allwood said. “It’s not as though we haven’t made any progress.”
“Don’t venture off the plantation, even in Berkeley,” I said.
Allwood turned to Wish. “You’ve gone to Rumford’s Pharmacy around the corner?”
Wish turned to me. “Is that where you sent me for stockings that time?”
Allwood shined that on. “Byron Rumford, the owner, was the first black elected official in Northern California. He established the Fair Employment Practices Commission and then the Fair Housing Act of 1963.”
Wish looked puzzled again and Allwood was reveling again, as he always did in ignorance. It was just a relief to me that for once I wasn’t the ignorant one.
“FEPC from the Fair Employment Practices Act,” Allwood said.
I added, “Rumford passed the act, then C. L. Dellums from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters chaired the commission.”
“We had to start getting blacks elected,” Allwood said. “The Okie finokees wanted the black migration to disappear once World War II was over. It took us until 1959.”
“Wasn’t good old Berkeley the base for all this?” Wish said.
“Yeah,” Allwood said. “Liberal Berkeley, which passed and then rescinded its own fair housing ordinance in 1963.”
“So I didn’t die and go to heaven in 1964 when I moved here,” Wish said.
I piped up, “That’s the year the school board was nearly recalled because of desegregation.”
“The white folks you have to watch real close are the liberals, in their own backyards,” Allwood said, and, finally, we all laughed together.
“My father and his whole church participated in a boycott of Berkeley downtown,” Allwood said. “Don’t buy where you can’t work. Those friendly black cashiers at Woolworth’s?”
“I know. Zorro put them there,” Wish said. “Black Zorro.”
That’s what I loved about Wish. He knew Zorro like I knew Zorro, the masked freedom fighter from the comic book, not the Disney hero in a wimp’s body. Wish was parrying with Allwood. By coming back with black Zorro, Wish was being sarcastic, like he knew that black people fought for their rights in Berkeley, and no one galloped in on a charger and gave them rights. But Allwood was too serious for the irony. Instead he had his I’m-going-to-figure-this-one-out look.
“White folks don’t want to deal with a lot of this stuff they created. They have a reason to want to blow their minds with LSD,” Allwood said. “We don’t.” And then we smoked two more joints before they started retracing their footsteps.
“What about the Afro-American Association?” Allwood said to Wish.
Wish shrugged his shoulders. “What’s that?”
“Don Warden’s organization. They have the Sunday meetings.” Allwood still had the I’m-going-to-figure-this-one-out look.
“Beats me. I never heard of Don Warden,” Wish said. Allwood sniffed the trail like a police dog.
“You never heard of Don Warden, the most prominent black attorney in the Bay Area, the man Huey Newton calls the most dangerous brother in America?” I said. I thought everybody knew Don Warden.
“He’s a rite of passage for brothers,” Allwood said. “The Afro-American Association—his group—hipped us to the reality that we don’t need more laws for justice, we need more justice. But after that, the association’s all about Don Warden.”
We smoked the last of the rolled joints.
Wish produced a doobie from his pocket. I asked if he wanted some tamale pie. He looked at my kitchen walls. “What happened to your roaches, Geniece?”
“Sprayed them into the beyond,” I said.
“Let’s hope,” Wish said, before taking a plate.
“Now I know where I’ve seen you. West Campus, Berkeley High,” Allwood said.
The whole room settled down. Even the incinerator calmed. We’d found it.
“I do carpentry there,” Wish said.
Allwood reacted as if that was impossible. “You’re an employee of the district?”
“No, man, you know it’s hard as hell to get on with Berkeley Unified.”
“Tell me. They don’t let splibs swim in the pool except on Friday nights. Unwritten rule.”
“What do you do there?” Wish asked.
Allwood, holding, took a big drag and forced it into his lungs, then passed it to me. “I tutor history, physics, calculus . . . you know, white kids on the way to Stanford, Cal Tech, Reed.”
I went over to the kitchen drawer. I wanted to share my black college brochures from down south with Wish and Allwood. I stumbled a little because of my buzz. When I opened the drawer underneath the kitchen counter, my eyes weren’t completely focused. Wish started pointing to me like I had the cooties, and Allwood started laughing, and I looked at my arm to see what was up.
Roaches were leaping out of my drawer, flying out, as if they’d been waiting for me to open that drawer for weeks. The three of us began swatting and slapping with the brochures. As we pounced on them and they pounced on us, I could almost hear them breeding, hatching, and listening to me and Allwood talk black, learn black, love black, fuck black all semester, hatching and scheming to scare the black out of me right at that moment. We pounced for a while, until Wish said we’d got them all.
“The last of them?” Allwood asked him.
“I hope so,” I said.
“I’m still suspicious,” Wish said. He went back to the drawer and carried it outside. Allwood followed him out. I swept up the mess and went outside. Wish had dumped the remaining contents into the trash. “They probably laid their eggs inside Geniece’s black college brochures.”
He looked back to the apartment. “What’s in the other drawers?”
“Silverware,” I said. “That was the only drawer with papers in it.”
“Let’s put the trash in the incinerator,” Allwood said, “to be sure.”
My gibberish started. I heard it, heard myself, still high, murmuring to the flame: Howard/Spelman/MorrisBrown/Talledega/PhilanderSmith/Wilberforce/Xavier/Hampton/Wiley/BethuneCookman.
“The talented-tenth factories,” Allwood said, tossing the brochures in the incinerator. “They nurture reactionary tendencies in the race. Not what Du Bois had in mind.”
He turned to Wish. “Don’t some of the kids call you Black Jesus?”
Wish nodded and shrugged. “It’s the hair.”
We stood there in a trance watching the heat ripple the air. I spoke. “When I was three, my father took me to a doctor in Berkeley, a specialist. I was talking like I just was now. I made sense to me, I guess, but no one else. The doctor told my father I was retarded. Before we left Codornices Village, a UC doctoral student worked with me, changing my speech pattern. I was her dissertation.”
The heat rippled through the chill in my body, a chill from the San Francisco Bay that settled in about 4:00 P.M. no matter the day’s temperature.
“But they say my dad grabbed me up, shouted, ‘Is this what you get paid fair money for?’ And stomped out of there.”
It came to me as I spoke that Allwood had scooped me up, the same way my father must have done in the doctor’s office, with indignation and love. When we went back in, we scarfed the rest of the pie. While Wish and Allwood were eating the corners, zeroing in on the crust and sauce and shreds of roasted cheese left, I made dessert. We sang along to “Put on a Happy Face.”
“Here’s how to have your whipped cream on top,” I said, slicing the Twinkie lengthwise and inserting the sliced strawberries, one by one, between the cake and the white cream.
“Where did you get this recipe?” Allwood asked, and that got us going, cracking up. I was the first one to keel over, passed out—like a light. They must have put my legs up. When I woke up they were out, on the floor, on the pillows from the daybed. I sat up in the dark, listening to them breathe. How strange to feel so comfortable with two men sleeping at my feet. I tried to pick it apart. When I colored as a kid I had a hard time staying in the lines. I’d color the wolf periwinkle along with the sky, or give the wolf a carnation pink tongue pink teeth pink legs pink forest. In this unlikely, unexpected cocoon, I felt safe.
* * *
I knew I was becoming militant. I just didn’t know if I wanted to become a militant. Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, the protesters, the sit-in demonstrators down south were my heroes. I loved them from a distance and on paper. But the militants I met, mostly the guys on the soapbox on Grove Street, were harsh and abrasive and condescending to everyone, not just white people. And they made people do things. They had the power to make people quit school and read a thousand books. They could make someone go cut her hair off. They stopped traffic on busy city streets and directed willing souls to go to Cuba, to Africa, to the Deep South, to dangerous places where they might not make it back. I didn’t want that kind of power over people. I just wanted it over myself.
13
Once I got rid of my roaches, I let Allwood hold political education classes in my apartment. We went through Chairman Mao’s little red book, Chairman Frantz Fanon, Chairmen Marx and Engels, Chairman W. E. B. Du Bois, Chairman Herbert Aptheker, Chairman Carter G. Woodson, chairman, chairman, chairman, so many chairmen and I only had a few chairs. My job was grand poobah of the bathroom, the vacuum, the seating arrangements, bringing kitchen chairs into the living room if my beat-up sofa wasn’t enough.
I made myself another job: cook. Every Tuesday morning I figured out something to cook for the four to six people who showed up, or sometimes only Allwood and the cook. Tamale pie, red beans and rice, stewed chicken over rice, macaroni and cheese with canned tuna. Once only the cook herself showed her face. So I ate all by myself. But most of the time, somebody came knocking on the door around 7:00 P.M.
One of the last Tuesdays o
f the whole semester I was unprepared for what happened except that, imitating Goosey, I had filled a ten-quart stew pot with black-eyed peas, neck bones, and rice. At least it looked like Goosey’s. I did my best to get it looking like it was supposed to. People showed up by 7:30, CP time. Cool. We dialogued until 7:45, when who should come strutting in like he owned the place but Abner. I barely spoke. He sidled up to me like he had never threatened me in the cafeteria.
But I was in no way prepared then for who came in after snaky Abner: Michelle Stubbs. She and I had graduated Castlemont High School together. She was a superbourgie. What was she doing at a PE class? I thought she was away at a black school like Howard or Fisk. Instead, here she was with Abner, practically bound to his wrist. I couldn’t see it unless he was hustling her. I simply couldn’t see the two of them together. She was Miss Ultra Bourgie. She had everything—a daddy with a title (Dr. Stubbs), parents with a home in the hills, long straight white people hair—everything except she was dark. Not dark like me, not that dark, but darker than a paper bag. In her world, she was dark. I knew she hadn’t turned into a black militant simply because she was darker than what was allowable in her social circle. Not Michelle, who drove a T-Bird like Natalie Wood in high school. Some things just don’t happen. Allwood began to pass around a new pamphlet that everybody examined with great curiosity.
By 8:00, everybody was engrossed in the pamphlet, Allwood was lecturing on it, and I couldn’t concentrate because Michelle and Abner were sending each other eyeball telegrams. What was going on with them? I finally saw the pamphlet. I looked at the first page not really thinking about it. Then my eyes focused and I had to keep myself from screaming, This scares me to death. A salty, spitty fear rushed into my mouth. The picture was frightening.